Botswana ethnic cleansing 'reaches final stage'

Survival International

BOTSWANA: ETHNIC CLEANSING REACHES FINAL PHASE

8 October 2005

SURVIVAL INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE

Dozens of Bushmen were evicted yesterday from their ancestral land in
the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana. Police carried out the
removals at gunpoint and then set fire to the Bushmen's huts.

A handful of Bushmen have resisted. The police have told them they
will be killed, and are following them to prevent them hunting or
gathering any food. The local District Commissioner (of the nearby
town, Ghanzi) is today inside the reserve overseeing the operation.
She told the Bushmen yesterday that the police will stay until every
last Bushman is removed.

Information was brought out today by those evicted.

In order to avoid reprisals, Survival will no longer name individual
Bushmen. One woman still inside the reserve said yesterday, 'We will
not leave our ancestral lands. We will die here. If they steal my
land, they just steal my life.'

Tensions in the region have been building for the last two weeks. In
that time, three Bushmen have been shot and wounded by police. One
was a seven-year old boy shot in the stomach as police tried to
arrest his father. In separate incidents, a man was shot in the face
and another in both legs as police tried to get him to confess to
hunting. The police have removed all the Bushman goats under the
pretext they were diseased. They have also sealed the area,
forbidding any journalists from going there.

Everyone involved in the Bushmen's own organisation, First People of
the Kalahari was arrested and beaten on 24 September. All are now
charged with 'illegal assembly'. On the day they were released from
prison the Bushmen heard that they, and their elder, Roy Sesana, had
won the 2005 alternative Nobel Prize.

The Botswana government has been trying to get the Gana and Gwi
Bushmen off their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game
Reserve since the 1980s when diamonds were discovered. Exploration
concessions leaped within a few days of the Bushmen being evicted in
2002. De Beers, which mines and sells all Botswana's diamonds, has
opposed the Bushmen, welcoming the 2002 evictions and falsely
accusing the Bushmen of hunting with high-powered rifles. De Beers
also wrongly claims there were no Bushmen at its concession at Gope
where it intends to mine.

Stephen Corry said today, 'If this is the last chapter in the
200-year old genocide of the Bushmen, then it's also the final
curtain for Botswana's and De Beers's reputation. A new policy,
abiding by international law and recognising Bushman land, would
begin the long haul of rebuilding that reputation, but there is not
the slightest sign of that happening. On the contrary, the ethnic
cleansing continues, and they're now even shooting small children.
Botswana's many friends must forcefully express their disgust, or
suffer enduring shame.'

For more information please ring +44 7815 300 664 or email mr@survival-international.org